When we heard product announcements from Microsoft's two previous CEOs, Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates, it was usually in the stadium-like settings of vast conference halls. News wasn't so much announced as shouted. Ballmer in particular seemed to like to pace around a large stage, leveling a hard stare at his audience like a tiger in a cage.

So it was a refreshing change when Microsoft's third CEO, Satya Nadella, launched Office for iPad Thursday in a light, airy white room in Microsoft's San Francisco office. No colorful lights, no eardrum-bursting music — just three screens and a self-effacing CEO. At last, the world's largest software giant had realized it didn't need to try so hard. What it needed to do was to prove its relevance to a world that seems to have moved on without it.

Nadella began by pointing out he'd been on the job a mere 52 days, "but who's counting." He projected an air of quiet confidence, discipline and intelligence. He referenced a T.S. Eliot quote without making it sound at all pretentious: "We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time."

The CEO was referencing the fact that he sees things entirely differently from his new office despite having been at Microsoft for 22 years. But "Little Gidding," the Eliot poem that the famous line comes from, contains another meaning appropriate to Microsoft at this point in its history. If you learn the lessons of the past, go through a period of suffering, and recognize the unity of all things, Eliot was saying, you will find yourself reborn.

One thing Nadella was anxious to make us recognize was the unity of all things — in particular, the unity of the cloud and mobile computing. "You can't have one without the other," he said. He promised that Microsoft products would simply work everywhere on every device; he made no bones about using the names "iPad" and "iPhone" where his predecessors might have said "tablet" or "smartphone"; he spoke in lofty terms of "ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence" as the basis for everything Microsoft does going forward.

Reporters who had been expecting the usual marketing spiel that attends the launch of an app or gadget were treated to something a little more transcendent. It's hard to hear a poetry-quoting top tech CEO without thinking of that famous phrase of Steve Jobs', that Apple existed "at the intersection of liberal arts and technology." (This particular phrase, we discovered Thursday, also inspired the lead developer of Office for iPad.)

Now it goes without saying that Nadella is no Jobs; it's near-impossible to replicate that level of intensity, or the unblinking gaze that drew you in to the famous reality distortion field. And Nadella may want to watch his presentation style if he doesn't want to get a reputation for unnecessarily long sentences — for example, "we don't like to leave things unfinished in terms of scenarios where you want to do things in your life." (Or as Nike might say, just do it.)

And there were definitely a couple of blind spots in his presentation. It would have been nice for the new CEO to address two of the elements of Office for iPad that are hard to swallow: the fact that you can't print from the app, and the subscription model of Office 365 itself. Anyone smart enough to use Excel is going to be able to do the math and realize that the cost of Office 365 far exceeds what we used to pay for Office upgrades; not even 20 GB of online storage may make it worth the cost.

If you're going to stick to the subscription model when there are a world of apps out there that read Microsoft documents, you really need to acknowledge its doubters and sell its benefits. Still, whatever plans Nadella has for Microsoft's business model can't be implemented in 52 days.

For now, though, it's enough that the new CEO has an infectious enthusiasm about his big-picture vision that eluded his predecessors.

He truly seems to get that the old days of Apple-Microsoft rivalry are long gone, that more of his customers are going to be touting iPads than Surfaces, and that it doesn't matter anyway: it's all the cloud and all its devices. That might explain the surprisingly cordial exchange of tweets Thursday between Nadella and Apple CEO Tim Cook:

Nadella also understands the importance of the oft-ignored IT professionals and their needs in implementing BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) policies, and that ease of use trumps all. But most importantly, he understands that the best thing you can have on your side when trying to sell technology to a skeptical world is a little bit of poetry.

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